The phrase “Northern Soul” emanated from the record shop called Soul City in Covent Garden, London, which was run by journalist Dave Godin. It was first publicly used in Godin’s weekly column in Blues & Soul magazine in June 1970. Prior to that it was just called Soul Music and was de rigeur in most dance clubs of the sixties. Godin said he had first come up with the term in 1968, to help employees at Soul City differentiate the more modern funkier sounds from the smoother Motown-influenced soul of a few years earlier. With contemporary black music evolving into what would eventually become known as Funk moving to Disco, the die-hard soul lovers of Northern England still preferred the mid-1960s era of Motown-sounding black American dance music.
I had started to notice that northern football fans who were in London to follow their team were coming into the store to buy records, but they weren’t interested in the latest developments in the black American chart. I devised the name as a shorthand sales term. It was just to say ‘if you’ve got customers from the north, don’t waste time playing them records currently in the U.S. black chart, just play them what they like – ‘Northern Soul’.
My connection to Northern Soul was there was a friend who sold used cars and once we all took a pill popping weekend trip in a black Ford Zephyr to Manchester and the all night Twisted Wheel Club where this type of music was played. Not particularly novel at the time. In Newcastle we just called it Soul music but apparently in Wigan and Manchester they kept this style for themselves for many years after.
